Cargo Cult Science – Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement address

Re:Cargo Cult Science – Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement ... by imranq on Monday March 06, 2023 @01:09PM (#35044975)

I don't see what the problem with Sabine's analysis is? I thought it was great.

Shouldn't particle physicists have more expectations of what they expect to find rather than we want to find X and we are going to search the entire energy frontier to find it. The problem is that the energy frontier is limitless so the ROI could be extremely poor unless we had a good idea of what we expect

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Re:Cargo Cult Science – Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement ... by bjornsing on Monday March 06, 2023 @01:20PM (#35045163)

> The problem is that the energy frontier is limitless so the ROI could be extremely poor unless we had a good idea of what we expect

AKA the full employment theorem of particle physics…

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Re:Cargo Cult Science – Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement ... by parton on Monday March 06, 2023 @07:35PM (#35049940)

If we knew what to expect, it would be engineering not science. The fact is, we have tried having expectations, most notably supersymmetry, and those haven't turned out very well because we are literally venturing into the unknown. Part of the fun is that sometimes a wild theory works out (GR, Higgs) and sometimes it doesn't.

I think if we push the energy frontier one more time, there's no real reason to expect us to find anything -- but there's also no reason for us not to find anything.

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